


Stars From Someone Else's Universe

by venividivictorious



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Amateur Wingectomy, Established Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Needs A Hug, POV Chloe Decker, Post-Episode: S05 E09 Family Dinner, Prompt Fic, Protective Chloe Decker, Speculation, and he gets one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27090559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venividivictorious/pseuds/venividivictorious
Summary: After family dinner goes poorly, Chloe drops by the penthouse to give her devil some comfort and finds that Lucifer is struggling more than expected with his father's arrival on Earth.From this Filii Hircus prompt: Chloe goes over to the penthouse and finds God has set Lucifer back so far that he's cut his wings off again.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 46
Kudos: 415





	Stars From Someone Else's Universe

She’s about to head home from a gruelling overtime shift when Amenadiel calls to tell her that ‘family dinner’ went about as well as she was expecting, and she says a silent prayer of thanks to absolutely nobody as she buckles her seatbelt and turns into the queue of traffic inching towards Sunset Boulevard. 

_ Christ _ , she hopes Lucifer’s okay. She  _ told _ him, she told him from the start that going to dinner with his stupid family was gonna end badly. She'd offered to go with him, as a buffer, like Dan did for her when they were married, but he'd turned her down. Claimed he didn't want to subject her to 'Dad’s particular brand of narcissism and lunacy', like she hasn't developed a decent tolerance for celestial craziness by now. 

He'll probably go all withdrawn and sulky if she asks him for the truth, the way he always does when she prods a little too hard in a spot that's just a little too sensitive, but she supposes he didn't take her because he didn't want to expose his weak spot to his family. And God, she can't say she blames him. 

When she finally pulls into the covered staff parking lot beneath Lux, she sees the Corvette is parked at a sharp angle across three spaces, an impressive set of skid marks dragging behind the rear wheels like contrails. She puts the Dodge neatly between the lines of the first space Lucifer isn't hogging, and when she hops out she notices he's left the keys in the ignition. 

A trickle of dread filters down her throat to end up coiled in her gut. Lucifer is loaded - obnoxiously so - but he's protective of his car. 

She snags her bag and sweater from the passenger seat, locks up her car and his, and texts Amenadiel from the elevator:  _ car here he's home _ .

The doors ping open to the reserved, earthy warmth of the penthouse, tinged orange by the artistic backlight at the bar and the soft glow of the tangled chandelier. She can tell Lucifer's home immediately. His jacket is draped over the back of one of the couches, and there's an empty bottle of top shelf scotch on the bar and an equally empty plastic baggie crumpled beside it - but he's nowhere to be seen. 

She sets Lucifer's keys on the gleaming bar counter, eyeing the baggie with distaste. 

"Lucifer?"

There's a thud from the direction of his bedroom, followed by a noisy clang of metal on marble that makes her jump out of her skin. And then Lucifer shouts back, "Be right out, Detective!" in that overly-chipper  _ everything-is-fine-except-not-really  _ voice she's gotten to know well over the last few years. 

Her heart sinks. This is more or less what she was expecting, but that didn’t stop her hoping that dinner would at least clear the air between Lucifer and his dad. 

She pours herself a glass of whiskey and another for him, and kicks off her boots to pad up the bedroom steps in her socks. The door to Lucifer's palatial ensuite is closed and she can hear him moving around in there, running a tap. She knocks twice. "You decent? I made you a drink."

"Just a second!"

She pulls back, a little thrown by the urgency in his tone. He sounds almost frantic. "Lucifer? Everything okay in there?"

He doesn't answer her; instead she hears him swear under his breath and something wet hits the floor with a slap.  _ What the fuck is he doing in there _ ?

"Lucifer?"

He  _ definitely _ sounds off. "Yes - I'll - give me a minute, Detective,  _ please _ , I'll  _ - _ "

And then he cuts off the rest of whatever he was about to say in favour of a sound that's caught somewhere between a sob and a harsh exhale through gritted teeth. She remembers breathing like that as she pushed Trixie into the world, desperately trying to breathe through the worst pain she's ever experienced to this day. 

She'd been in agony. 

"Lucifer, I'm coming in."

She doesn't give him time to respond. The door slides open and for a solid second or two, she utterly fails to process the carnage. 

And then it hits her all at once. 

There's blood - so much blood -  _ everywhere _ . Pooling in little puddles on the floor, smeared across the countertop, dripping in a steady spatter from the blade of a dagger like the ones Maze was always flinging at her apartment walls...and in the middle of the chaos is Lucifer, ghostly pale and shirtless, on all fours as he tries to mop up the worst of the blood with a sopping towel. Her eyes land square on his back where he’s bent over, and nausea bubbles up into her throat from her gut. 

Like, she remembers how the marbled pattern of the healed crescents she’d seen a few years ago had struck her as horrific at the time. That was what first made her reach out to him, the vulnerability in his eyes when he’d caught her wrist to stop her touching. 

_ Don’t. Please. _

Those scars had nothing on the twin patches of raw, exposed meat and muscle she’s looking at now. 

He looks up at her, meets her eyes, and makes a tiny little unconscious sound of dismay. 

"I tried to tell you," he says in a very small voice. "I didn't want - you shouldn't see - I wasn't expecting you."

Her voice comes back to her as a croak. She takes a step towards him, reaching out, and that's when she catches sight of them, haphazardly kicked out of view further along the counter. His wings, soft and beautiful and so very, very detached from his back. 

"God, Lucifer, what did you  _ do _ ?" she breathes, and his face crumples. He sits back on his heels, swaying a bit with the movement like he's dizzy, and of course he's fucking dizzy, Chloe,  _ Jesus _ .

He rubs the back of his hand across his cheek, leaving a dark red streak in its wake. His eyes are puffy, and his eyeliner is smudged around his eyes where he's been rubbing them. God, he must've been - 

She circles around behind him, leaning in to get a closer look. There’s - she can’t see any bone, which...has gotta be a good thing. In places, it looks like some of the worst cases of road rash she’s ever seen, skinned flesh with ragged edges. In others, though...she can see down to the muscle of his back in places, like he’s scooped out... _ something _ ...that ought to be there. 

_ Oh God _ , she thinks, blinking away tears as they well up.  _ The wingbone. That’s where the bone should be _ . 

More than once in those few seconds, she reaches out towards him only to pull her hand back again. And she’s pretty sure she chokes something at him, maybe along the lines of, “Do I need to go?” because...because...well, what if his invulnerability around her isn’t permanent? What if her being here makes him worse? 

Faintly, she hears him respond, his voice dull and exhausted. “You don’t need to do anything, Detective. I’ve done this before; I’ll be good as new soon enough.”

And finally, her sensible, logical police brain catches up with her horrified girlfriend brain. She pulls down the shutter between her and the gore.  _ Just another crime scene _ , she tells herself.  _ Could be anybody's blood. You need to handle this _ . 

She draws in a slow, deep breath, and lets it out to the count of three. “Okay. Okay. We can fix this. Lucifer - come here, give me that.” 

His eyebrows pull together like he's about to protest, but whatever he sees in her face must make him think better of it, because he doesn't try to stop her when she reaches for the bloodied towel and tosses it on the countertop with a sickening, wet sound. His hands are shaking when she takes them in hers, and he groans in pain through clenched teeth as she helps him to his feet. His skin isn’t much warmer than hers, and she wonders if that’s a bad sign on him. Shock, maybe? If he was human, he’d be in shock. What does shock even look like on the Devil? 

“Detective, I’m sorry,” Lucifer mumbles, letting his head tip forward to rest against hers. “I was - it's just - look, I  _ had _ to. They’re not me. I wanted - I don’t - I’m sorry.”

Christ. She has no idea what happened at dinner, but next time God Almighty shows His face at the precinct she’s gonna smack Him so hard He’ll be seeing stars from someone else’s universe. For a minute, she just lets Lucifer lean on her, strokes her thumb over his stubbled jaw and wishes she could love away the hurt in him. “You don’t have to apologise to me, Lucifer. Not for this."

"No?" He's really asking, too. Sometimes he's so  _ young _ it makes her chest ache.

"Nope." She gives his chest what she hopes is a reassuring pat and steps away. "Leave that for now, yeah? Let’s get you cleaned up. Okay?”

His teeth catch on his bottom lip, and he nods meekly. "Okay."

"Have you got a first aid kit up here?" she asks. "Or - at the bar? I could go get the one from Lux."

Another nod. "Under the bar," he says helpfully, and then clarifies, with a gesture in the vague direction of his living space, "My bar. Out there."

"Right. Okay. Good. I'll go get that. You...you're not gonna pass out in the next thirty seconds, are you?"

His chuckle is brittle; a huff of breath, a tiny quirk of his lip. "No, Detective."

"Okay," she says again, because what else can she say when she can see his wings from the corner of her eye, edged in gristle and meat, cut from his body by his own hand and dumped on the floor like the trash he thinks he is? What words are gonna make that better? "Good."

Her stomach twists into uneasy knots as she leaves him to go hunt down his first aid kit. What if he  _ does _ pass out? He could hit his head falling. He could have...she doesn't know...some kind of internal bleeding, maybe? Would cutting off your wings give you internal bleeding? 

She ducks down behind his lounge bar to look for the first aid kit in the cupboards. Glasses...more glasses, a whole bunch of different shapes and sizes...a tray of brightly colored paper umbrellas...the Devil's  _ bong _ collection...

Lucifer calls something muffled from the bathroom, but he doesn't sound distressed, so she shouts back, "Huh?"

For a heartbeat, he doesn't respond. And then -

"I said," he repeats, appearing at the top of the steps looking pale and drawn, "It's in the end one. That's - no, that's mostly edible undies in there. Over by the elevator. In the green box, behind your offspring's bloody soda."

She grabs the green box out of the cupboard - behind the Coke he keeps for when she brings Trix over for game night, just like he said, because he's  _ that _ kind of anal - and sucks in a breath at the sight of him. It makes her want to cry, to see him hurting, and all she can do is be  _ pragmatic _ . Crying won’t do either of them any good. "God, Lucifer, get back in there. You're gonna get blood everywhere."

She waves an arm in a  _ you first _ gesture, and he obediently shuffles back into the bathroom ahead of her. She feels - ugh -  _ helpless _ , wants to pull him close and hold him, protect him from his world so he can be safe and happy in hers. 

"How do you want me?" he asks as she sets the green box on the corner of his ridiculous hot tub of a bath, dodging around the mess. 

“Hop in the tub for me?” she rolls up the long sleeves of her shirt. “I should probably clean those up before I bandage them. You should take your pants off.”

“Oh!” he barks a laugh. “De _ tective _ . If you wanted to get me naked, darling, you only had to ask.”

She looks up sharply and he waggles his fucking eyebrows at her, tonguing the inside of his cheek. Normally, she finds that stupid little smirk endearing and she’d give him an eyeroll or something, because for some reason  _ that’s _ what he’s internalised as a positive response, but right now - 

"Don't do that."

The cheeky expression falls slowly, running off his face like water, and he starts undoing his belt. "What?"

"Pretend you're fine when you're not." She leans over to turn on the handheld showerhead and adjusts the temperature - a bit too hot for her is usually just right for Lucifer. When he’s naked she pats the lip of the tub. "You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with me. C'mere. Sit."

He doesn't seem to know how to respond to that, and for a little bit he goes quiet. He parks himself in the tub with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. "You ready? This is gonna sting."

His voice is steady, even as she watches the muscles in his shoulders brace. "I've had far worse, I assure y- _ argh _ ! Bloody hell, Detective, easy!" 

Trails of blood from the two gnarly wounds in his shoulder blades run down his back in tacky, sticky rivulets as steam curls gently towards the ceiling. 

"Sorry. I did warn you." 

She works quietly for a while, cleaning up his back and using his washcloth to wipe the blood off his hands and arms and face and  _ good god,  _ how did he manage to get it  _ everywhere _ ? He obligingly swivels in place and tilts his head for her so she can reach everywhere she needs to, and - 

Like, he could  _ literally _ kill her, just crush her skull in one hand like a walnut, but...it's just, he lets her move him around like a doll and trusts her to know what's best for him, and he may be many shitty things, but he's also silly and stubborn and sweet and  _ hers _ , and she knows in her bones that any god who’d want to hurt him is neither benevolent nor loving. 

She leans down and presses a kiss to the top of his head, and that seems to draw him out of his shell again. There's a little quirk at the side of his mouth when he looks over at her. "What was that for?"

"No reason. I just love you." She kills the water, replaces the showerhead in its cradle, and leans over to open the first aid kit. "So...d'you wanna talk about dinner?"

"Not particularly, darling."

_ Yeah, right.  _ "Okay."

She's halfway through putting on a pair of blue nitrile gloves when he explodes. "I just - I don't know what I was expecting, Detective, I really don't, and - it's just so bloody stupid that I thought maybe He might apologise, that after all this bloody time I thought the bastard might've -"

He cuts himself off, and it sounds like he strangles himself to do it. She picks out a tube of Neosporin and sets about dabbing it onto the twin crescents of raw flesh as he forces out, "I thought He might've decided that I wasn't evil anymore."

Her mouth drops open, and the thing is, like…

Sometimes, as a parent, your kid'll turn to you and say something so horrifically wrong that you kinda want to fight the whole world for putting that idea in their head in the first place? Like the time Trixie got it into her head that that whole thing with Malcolm - that it was  _ her _ fault Lucifer got shot in that hangar. And sometimes Lucifer says shit like that too, and she definitely doesn't wanna try to mother her boyfriend, the Devil, old-as-balls immortal being, but just...he needs to  _ know _ . 

She cuts across whatever he was gonna say next, gets her free hand under his chin and tilts his head to lock eyes with him. "Hey. No. You didn't need to  _ stop being evil _ , Lucifer. You were never evil in the first place. You're worth ten of Him."

He blinks, and the tip of his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. His eyelashes are damp. "I think history would disagree with you there, darling."

"Screw history." She lets go of his chin, wiping away the Neosporin she left there with the back of her hand, and goes back to applying it to his injuries. "You know, after  _ Hot Tub High School _ came out, Cody - the, uh, the guy who played my boyfriend? Well, someone decided to tell the vultures I was pregnant with his kid." She huffs out a bitter chuckle. "It wasn't true, but they all hounded me over it anyway. Analyzed my weight, said I was getting bigger, trashed me for having a teen pregnancy. They made me miserable. And it was all crap."

She caps the Neosporin and tosses it back in the box, swapping it for a thick gauze pad and ripping open the wrapping. "That's all it is, Lucifer. Bad publicity. Your dad told some lies and you got trashed for it. It hurts, but people believing it doesn't make it true."

"Bad publicity," he repeats softly, like he's testing the words on his tongue. "Well, that's one way of looking at it."

She takes advantage of his distraction and presses the gauze pad over the wounds. Lucifer presses his head back against her hip, hissing through gritted teeth. He leaves it there, his face tilted up towards hers, as he says quietly, "You used to hate me, remember? You thought I was repulsive."

"Well, yeah." She holds the gauze in place with one hand and roots through the box for some tape. "You were an asshole. So smug, you know? And so arrogant. I thought you were a complete tool. But you were never evil."

He's still looking up at her, and on impulse she kisses him again, his forehead this time. He leans into it, like he always does, like he wants to drag it out as long as possible because he doesn't know where the next bit of affection will come from. She's fucking adamant that one day, in her lifetime, he's gonna be so damn secure in her love that he won't look like that anymore. 

She pulls away reluctantly and hands him the roll of tape. "Rip me off some of this, please?"

His eyelids flutter open almost like he's dazed, and - god, she just really loves his eyes. They're the one little window to his soul that he never fully managed to barricade. 

And then he takes the tape, pulling off strips to hand to her as she sticks the gauze firmly over his wounds, all efficiently helpful. She cringes at the thought of how many times he had to do this all alone. 

"Okay," she announces after a few more minutes - she might've gone a bit overboard on the tape, but...better safe than sorry, right? "All done. You can get out."

He uses the edge of the tub to gingerly push himself to his feet and steps out onto the bathmat, carefully rolling his shoulders. "Excellent. My arse is going numb." 

She grabs him a fluffy towel from the rack on the back of the door and reaches around him to wrap it around his hips for him. His hands move automatically to her waist and when she goes to step away he seems...reluctant to let go, edging a little closer, into her space. "Thank you, Detective."

She gives his hand a little squeeze. "You're welcome, Lucifer. D'you feel any better?"

Once, she knows, he would've told her he'd be fine. He's like one of those animals that pretends he's not hurt so predators won't sense weakness. It means so much to her that he actually considers it for a second, teeth worrying his bottom lip. "I'm…bloody exhausted, honestly. And I'd shag Daniel right now for a drink."

She cackles before she can stop herself, tries to suck the laugh back in and ends up choking on a snort, which is -  _ god _ \- even less attractive than the 'demented witch on crack' laugh in the first place. "O _ kay _ , tough guy. How about you get your butt in that bed, and I'll handle the drink. We can watch a movie or something. Leave the mess, we’ll tackle that when you’re feeling better."

Which he'll sleep through about eighty percent of, as usual. He tends to doze off when she's holding him. 

" _ Body Bags _ ?" he suggests hopefully. 

" _ Not _ Body Bags."

The little shit actually  _ pouts _ , makes his eyes go all big and round and pleading, and, "But  _ Detective _ . I'm  _ hurt _ ."

And - like, it'd be a fucking low blow if she wasn't so pleased he pulls that card with her at all, but...the thing is, the whole thing where he plays up vulnerability with her, it all hinges on her love for him. Trixie does it too, playing on her  _ desire _ \- ha - to make her little monkey happy to get what she wants. It's his weird Lucifer way, she thinks, of asking for reassurance that she  _ does _ love him. 

" _ Awww _ ," she drags out, teasing. "You poor thing. Alright, you win,  _ Body Bags _ it is."

_ I love you,  _ is what she means, and from the softness of the smile that breaks like dawn across his face, she thinks he hears it. 

But all he says is, "Thank you.  _ Chloe _ ."


End file.
